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By Paul Greenberg (May 03, 2011)
What impressed most when the news arrived late Sunday night was the cheering, yelling, flag-waving crowd that materialized almost immediately outside the White House.... more
By Paul Greenberg (Apr 28, 2011)
It's no secret that the messianic hopes Barack Obama once inspired have steadily given way to disillusion, and an ever-deepening sense of unease about the direction the... more
By Paul Greenberg (Apr 27, 2011)
The elephant in the room is getting harder and harder to ignore. It's not just bigger than ever, but threatens to go on a rampage that could lay waste everything around it.... more
By Paul Greenberg (Apr 20, 2011)
There was a time when the Bible and Shakespeare were recognized as twin pillars of not just English literature but Western civilization. Wherever the English-speaking... more
By Paul Greenberg (Apr 12, 2011)
Let's see if I've got this right. According to NPR's official line, the greatest hope for objective news reporting on the American airwaves will be lost if its... more
By Paul Greenberg (Apr 11, 2011)
The good doctor could have stepped out of a Louis Auchincloss short story. A fashionable but conscientious professional on the Upper West Side, his ideas, like his Brooks... more
By Paul Greenberg (Apr 01, 2011)
When, oh, when is the Obama administration going to recognize the rebels in Benghazi as that country's legitimate government?
Those ill-equipped, ill-organized freedom... more
By Paul Greenberg (Mar 30, 2011)
LITTLE ROCK -- It is a truth universally acknowledged among baseball fans: There is life and there is the off-season.
The off-season now thrashes to an end in the throes... more
By Paul Greenberg (Mar 28, 2011)
Some of us have seen this movie before -- and didn't much like it the first time.
The cast might have changed but the plot is the same: A president thinks he can keep... more
By Paul Greenberg (Mar 21, 2011)
If there is one number from the vast jumble the Obama administration calls a federal budget, it's this one: The American economy is projected to grow at the rate of 5 percent... more
By Paul Greenberg (Mar 17, 2011)
If you're looking for a three-word explanation for why so many Americans grow so cynical about government, you could do worse than this one:
Erma Fingers... more
By Paul Greenberg (Mar 16, 2011)
"... if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought -- not free thought... more
By Paul Greenberg (Mar 14, 2011)
It would be wrong to say this president had no policy toward the revolution in Egypt. On the contrary, he's had many. One for every day. Every hour. He still does. Just as he... more
By Paul Greenberg (Mar 09, 2011)
One of the most abused words in today's political rhetoric has to be "lie." It's used to cover everything from an innocent misstatement to a broken promise to a misleading... more
By Paul Greenberg (Mar 08, 2011)
It was the always observant Mary McCarthy who observed that antisemitism is the one form of intellectuality that appealed to stupid people. But she may have overlooked its... more
By Paul Greenberg (Mar 02, 2011)
Leave it to a prof at the University of Arkansas -- specifically, an economist in its Department of Education Reform -- to go to the heart (and guts) of what all the fuss is... more
By Paul Greenberg (Mar 02, 2011)
There are few better ways to go back in time and ever deeper into the South, which are much the same thing, than to drive through the Delta down to New Orleens Land of... more
By Paul Greenberg (Feb 28, 2011)
That most Southern of phrases, "a sense of place," came up at a gathering the other evening. It elicited only a quizzical expression from one of the guests, who seemed to... more
By Paul Greenberg (Feb 24, 2011)
It isn't T.E. Lawrence's revolt in the desert, leading a hodgepodge of Arab tribes across the desert in the Arab revolt against the Turks in the World War, Act I. That... more
By Paul Greenberg (Feb 23, 2011)
I tried to stay interested in Bill O'Reilly's interview with Barack Obama some weeks ago. Honest I did. Duty called but, when I answered, it turned into what seemed a... more
By Paul Greenberg (Feb 21, 2011)
One of the uncounted, indeed oft intangible, ways in which the United States of America is an exceptional country is that here citizenship is not a matter of race, creed,... more
By Paul Greenberg (Feb 16, 2011)
Once upon a different time the communists and their fellow travelers had a simple slogan and strategy: No enemies to the left!
It sounds better in French -- pas... more
By Paul Greenberg (Feb 16, 2011)
Once upon a different time the communists and their fellow travelers had a simple slogan and strategy: No enemies to the left!
It sounds better in French -- pas... more
By Paul Greenberg (Feb 14, 2011)
Civility and the need for it is much in the news these days, often enough in a political context, and even more often when pundits and pols are accusing each other of lacking... more
By Paul Greenberg (Feb 08, 2011)
Their faces are a mirror of hope, pride, exhilaration ... in short, youth! Direct from Liberation Square in Cairo, they crowd our television screens here in the West,... more
By Paul Greenberg (Feb 05, 2011)
Like all modern revolutions since the fashion was introduced in Paris, events in Egypt proceed a la francaise: in a series of successive shocks from right to left... more
By Paul Greenberg (Feb 03, 2011)
Something new is being heard along the Nile: the sound of freedom. It always comes as a surprise to Egypt's rulers. For they have grown up seeing the great river flood, then... more
By Paul Greenberg (Jan 29, 2011)
When it comes to bureaucracies, corporate or public, it's not just jobs that can be delegated but any sense of responsibility. This isn't just a familiar pattern, it's... more
By Paul Greenberg (Jan 27, 2011)
"He shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and... more
By Paul Greenberg (Jan 26, 2011)
I see by the Letters column that I'm in trouble with readers again, but when am I not? Which is fair enough. More than fair, since I signed up for criticism when I... more
By Paul Greenberg (Jan 25, 2011)
Any discussion of whether to end, mend, or generally fiddle with the filibuster might well begin by trying to understand what it is, and why such a practice developed in the... more
By Paul Greenberg (Jan 19, 2011)
Buried in the mass of directives issued by the new head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services was a little ol' regulation putting the government in the... more
By Paul Greenberg (Jan 18, 2011)
By now successive generations of historians have set out to capture the uncapturable essence of the man -- the Real Robert E. Lee, they say. And yet, despite all their... more
By Paul Greenberg (Jan 13, 2011)
Suppose you had billions and billions of dollars and wanted to set up a foundation that would really make a real difference in the world?
You could draw up a mission... more
By Paul Greenberg (Jan 11, 2011)
Out with one member in good standing of the Daley machine, Rahm Emanuel, and in with another, this time a Daley himself, as the president's chief of staff. The more things... more
By Paul Greenberg (Jan 07, 2011)
It's the way every new Congress begins -- with pomp amid familiar circumstances. Once again, the Outs have become the Ins, and the opposition now becomes the majority, at... more
By Paul Greenberg (Jan 06, 2011)
You may not recognize the name Robert Macauley. Or even that of his brainchild, AmeriCares. But there was a time -- April of 1975, the Last Days of Saigon -- when he was very... more
By Paul Greenberg (Jan 05, 2011)
Can the Barack Obama who was a senator just a couple of years ago be the same one who's now president? Some of us can recall a time when Sen. Obama was saying the Surge... more
By Paul Greenberg (Jan 04, 2011)
They were supposed to be gone. They were supposed never to have existed. Remember the foofaraw over the part of ObamaCare that was going to have Medicare finance, uh,... more